ion, which
alcohol brought into the dulness of human days, and the history of
culture shows it on every page.

But with the emotion dries up the will. Mere righteousness needs no
stimulation. But the American nation would never have achieved its
world work if the attitude of resignation had been its national trait.
Those pioneers who opened the land and awoke to life its resources
were men who longed for excitement, for the intensity of life, for
vividness of experience. The nation would not be loyal to its
tradition if it were not to foster this desire of intense experience:
the moderate use of alcohol is both training in such intensified
conscious experience and training in the control and discipline of
such states. The nation needs both, and as the child learns to prepare
for the work of life by plays and games, so man is schooling himself
for the active and effective life by the temperate use of exciting
beverages which playingly awake those vivid feelings of success. The
scholar and the minister and a thousand other individuals may not need
this training, but the millions, the masses, cannot prepare themselves
for a national career of effectiveness if this opportunity is taken
from their lives. History shows it abundantly.

To be sure, all this is but half true, because, as we said, the
individual, and finally the nation, may seek substitutes, may
satisfy the craving for emotional excitement, for will elation, for
intense experience, by other means than the oldest and most widely
scattered. Zealotism in religious belief, tyranny and cruelty,
sexual over-indulgence and perversion, gambling and betting, mysticism
and superstition, recklessness and adventurousness, and, above all,
senseless crimes have always been the psychological means of
overcoming the emptiness and monotony of an unstimulated life. They
produce, just like alcohol, that partial paralysis and create intense
experiences. They thus take hold of the masses, so long as the
social mind is not entirely dried up, with the necessity of a
psychological law. There is no more dangerous state for a healthy,
strong nation than mental monotony in the life of the masses.
Catholic countries play to the imagination at least through the
religion, monarchic countries have their own picturesqueness and
color, America under prohibition pushes the masses into gambling and
reckless excitements and sexual disorder and money-crazes and
criminal explosions of the mind.